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You are here: Home / vSphere Security Hardening Report Script Updated for vSphere 5.1

vSphere Security Hardening Report Script Updated for vSphere 5.1

03.25.2013 by William Lam // 10 Comments

A public draft of the vSphere Security Hardening Guide for vSphere 5.1 was released a few weeks back by my colleague Mike Foley. Since then I have been asked by several people if I had a chance to update my vSphere Security Hardening Report Script. The answer was unfortunately no due to other projects I had been working on and this script as well as others are maintained outside of my normal day job. I finally found some time this past weekend to go through the 5.1 revision of the hardening guide and make the necessary updates to my script which includes a few additional checks.

The script continues to provide backwards compatibility to previous releases of the vSphere Security Hardening Guide for vSphere 5.0, 4.1 and 4.0. Maintaining this compatibility is actually quite a challenge due to small minor changes in the hardening guide from previous versions, but I am please to say the latest 5.1 draft has now been implemented.

Disclaimer: This script is not officially supported by VMware, please test this in a development environment before using on production systems.  

Here is a sample output for the Security Hardening Report for a subset of my vSphere 5.1 home lab environment using "profile1" check:
vmwarevSphereSecurityHardeningReport-SAMPLE.html

For more details about the security hardening script, please refer to the documentation here.

If you have any feedback/questions on the vSphere Security Hardening Guide itself, make sure you to leave your comments and questions here. If you have any feedback/questions regarding the script, please join the vSphere Security Hardening Report VMTN Group for further discussions.

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Categories // Uncategorized Tags // ESXi 5.1, hardening guide, security, vSphere 5.1

Comments

  1. *protectedMichael says

    03/25/2013 at 6:54 pm

    Great work William!!
    Please note folks, that this script is based on a pre-release version of the 5.1 hardening guide. The RC version is coming REAL SOON followed a few weeks later by the GA version. As William is want to do, I'm sure the script above will be updated very shortly after the GA of the 5.1 HG. 🙂

    Reply
    • *protectedAnonymous says

      04/30/2013 at 11:18 am

      What do you consider "a few weeks"? It has now been a month and I have seen NO new updates to the draft.

      Reply
    • *protectedWilliam Lam says

      04/30/2013 at 9:51 pm

      The vSphere 5.1 Security Hardening Guide official release was released on 4/15, here's the announcement https://blogs.vmware.com/security/2013/04/vsphere-5-1-hardening-guide-official-release.html

      Reply
  2. *protectedAndrea Mauro says

    03/30/2013 at 5:46 am

    Really useful

    Reply
  3. *protectedmarcel disuja says

    11/30/2013 at 8:49 am

    What a wonderful post. I have learnt so much from this blog.I like your blog.Thanks for the post.
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    Reply
  4. *protectedJames Deighan says

    12/11/2013 at 12:15 pm

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    Reply
  5. *protectedYan says

    05/27/2014 at 7:32 am

    Hi William,

    Is the script based on the public draft or the final release of the hardening guide?

    Thanks
    Yan

    Reply
  6. *protectedAmit Vyas says

    09/22/2014 at 4:13 pm

    Hi William,

    Really nice work you have done

    Just wanted to check is this script will work on 5.5 ?

    I was able to run the script without any error but unfortunately HTML file didn't show the any content

    Awaiting for your reply

    Regards,
    Amit Vyas

    Reply
  7. *protectedRajesh Gala says

    02/04/2016 at 10:01 pm

    Nice work,But how to use this perl script.pre-requisite and what is required to execute it.

    Thanks waiting for the earliest reply.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. vSphere Hardening – Part 2 | Adventures in a Virtual World says:
    03/30/2014 at 1:06 pm

    […] the “vSphere Security Hardening Report Script”. The latest edition for vSphere 5.1 can be found here. The page also contains a link to the download location. Very detailed instructions how to run the […]

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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